The Team Championship for Men and Women of the 16th Asian Games commenced today at the Guangzhou Chess Institute, China.
The Championship will be held in two phases. Phase one-Preliminaries- will be seven round Swiss to determine the four qualifiers for the semifinals. Each team's place in order of classifiication shall be decided by the number of Match points it has scored.
Phase two will be Semifinals. Qualifiers will be paired by their Preliminaries ranking. Match A will be between 1 and 4 and Match B will be between 2 and 3. The two winners shall play the finals on 26th Nov. for gold and silver. The other two will batlle for bronze.
Chinese Chess Association President Chu Bo with Chinese players.A total of 17 teams have entered the competition in the men's section and 12 in the women's section with China and India being the first and second seeds in both the sections.
There were no surprises on the first day as all the seeded teams had easy wins barring top seed China in the Men's section. Bangladesh gave them a run for their money and only lady luck saved them from the blushes. While the top three boards between Wang Yue and Niaz Murshed, Bu Xiangzhi and Minhazuddin Ahmed and Zhou Jianchao and Ziaur Rehman ended in draws, on the fourth Board Ni Hua was three pawns down against FM Abu Sufian Shakil. The Bangladeshi blundered and lost, thus China went home with full match points.
In the other games of the day India beat Kyrgyzstan 3.5-.5, Kazakhstan beat Yemen 3-1 where the lone shock defeat was that of GM Khusnutdinov Rustam, who lost to unheralded CM Sallam Sabri. Vietnam defeated Jordan 3.5-.5, Uzbekistan defeated Mongolia 3-1, the lone victory for Mongolia was via Gundavaa Bayarsaikhan by defeating GM Anton Filippov. Philippines defeated Iraq 3-1, Iran and Qatar won 4-0 against Korea and Maldives respectively.
In the Women's section, top seed China made short work of Mongolia 4-0, second seed India defeated Turkmenistan 3.5-.5, Vietnam got the better of Qatar 3-1, with GM Zhu Chen the lone winner for Qatar on the top Board, Iran blanked Syria 4-0, Uzbekistan beat Korea 4-0 and Bangladesh beat Jordan 4-0 .
